Dear MIT Cycling,
Despite having some incredibly intense days during the last, oh, two weeks of driving team equipment around (and dealing with two different feed zones, yum!), I’d still qualify this as our most intense period. Tim and I left Lincoln, NE early in the morning after visiting The Coffee House*. We traveled across Iowa without stopping for more than gas and a reprise of the World’s Largest Truck Stop. Tim then covered all of Illinois and a good chunk of Indiana. He had the bad luck of getting the worst construction along I-80. We continued across Ohio before taking time out for a celebratory dinner in which Tim again demonstrated his endless stomach capacity, only to be rivaled by the Death Star. (Tim may have won.) The literal mound of ice cream, toffee, and whipped cream they brought out would have brought any reasonable man to his knees: Tim proved he either had no knees or no reason.
Tim grabbed a load of late night coffee and took the night shift across the rest of Ohio, Penn, and a good portion of New York. We switched off through to Lee, MA, where Tim again demonstrated his stomach capacity when devouring celebratory breakfasts** at the local diner. (His breakfast bread pudding also came with a mound of whipped cream.) We booked the rest of the distance back along the Mass Pike, arriving a only 10 minutes late (we got stuck behind an MIT shuttle bus picking up grad students who couldn’t walk the 1.00 km from Tang to 77 Mass Ave), which we figured was pretty good for having driven for twenty some hours. And for those of you who were curious, yes, I did made my afternoon flight to the conference thanks to Tim’s heroic driving ability.
For those not keeping track: we saw eight states within 24 hours (out of nine total on our trip), rolled the van’s odometer over the 25,000 mile mark, accumulated enough bug guts on our windshield to feed a starving village for twelve days (see earlier posts), encountered two frat boys who took longer to order their coffee than an entire sorority going to Starbucks together (I can’t get what Suzie’s getting, what should I get instead?), and survived literally more miles than I could shake a stick at. I did try, I promise.
Nationals Road Trip Out,
Loomis
* Lincoln’s best coffee drinking atmosphere, with The Mill as a close second. This is the place that got me started on the bean. If you visit, try their mochas or teas, too. Shameless plug done.
** Yep, that was plural on purpose.